"Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!' - that is the motto of enlightenment." (Immanuel Kant)

Friday, April 16, 2010

The Penumbra of the Empty, Part XX

Thought would build forth from the foundation in something like inevitability, as if according to plan, each level atop the foundation achieving the same stability as the foundation.

There wouldn’t be any surprises, any startling and disturbing discoveries, of faults or of unexpected strengths or resiliencies. A steady consistency, a redoubtable security.

All of the above describes thought in terms of inertial movement—what I call Totalization.Therefore, I think there are very good reasons for connecting foundationalism to Totalization.

Also, I notice the appropriateness of the “to build” or “to construct” metaphor to thought understanding itself in this way, and the inappropriateness of “to grow” or “growth” to this self understanding of thought. ( A building needs a foundation, but growing doesn’t necessarily or even usually.)

You can call the wall of the uterus a ground by drawing comparisons of a symbolic or metaphoric nature and thus make it seem growing "certainly" needs a ground, but you are then equivocating on the meaning of both ground and growth.

There are many organisms which live their entire life cycle in the atmosphere--they don't come to the ground for their growing phases. Etc.

Descartes isn't motivated simply to find some kind of self-certainty, but to find this self-certainty in order to securely or trustworthily build his edifice of thought. If this wasn't his motivation, please explain that. Both "build" and "foundation" are metaphors for certain images of thought. "Growth" is probably a metaphor, too, but I believe it is a different metaphor and it yields a different kind of thinking, and I want to examine that.

I am plagued by vague metaphors and thoughts here. I don't aim to critique foundationalism, and maybe my small insight (I know it has no originality) couldn't surprise or inform anyone else, but there's a relationship between foundationalism and totalization and it has something to do with the way thought thinks it raises itself up uniformly, solidly, securely from this point of self-certainty it has discovered in the cogito.

I had a very interesting photograph of a drop of blood mixing with water which I considered integral to the post (though I am sure thinking that was another sign of my idiosyncracy,) which got lost or screwed up somehow, and I can't find it again. Part of what interested me was that it showed a fluid structure, a snap shot of fluid structure. We have a very large conceptual array available to us for thinking of "fluid structure" (to be quick and dirty in trying to name this) but philosophy is way behind here, I think. In some ways to talk about it is old hat, I know. But in other ways, I believe this still needs to be talked about.

I think you misuse Descartes to draw your own image of an opponent. Descartes wanted to efficiently seperate the res-extensa from the res-cogito. This is what later becomes the subject and object duality that we know so well. By doing this Descartes could effeciently prove why the empiricial was deterministic.

2) Those beings you mention, an egg inside a womb etc. certainly that is not the situation for an adult human being .. so what make those examples relevant for a human philosophy?

3) A structure is something that does not change over a period of time .. And then of course it may change rapidly in a short time, and establish a new lasting structure for some time .. So the "fluid structure" really isnt a structure since it changes slowly all the time. It is a pseudo-structure at best. For that reason I find the concept weak and passive.

"I think you misuse Descartes to draw your own image of an opponent. Descartes wanted to efficiently seperate the res-extensa from the res-cogito. This is what later becomes the subject and object duality that we know so well. By doing this Descartes could effeciently prove why the empiricial was deterministic."

You've got a point. To call Descartes' philosophy a foundationalism isn't really fair --it is a trite and simplistic interpretation which isn't very helpful. I need to find a better way to contrast what Foucault was saying with the Borges quote to show what I think is distinctive and useful in Foucault's use of the Borges.

Hopefully I can come back later and say something additional about your other comments.

"Those beings you mention, an egg inside a womb etc. certainly that is not the situation for an adult human being .. so what make those examples relevant for a human philosophy?"

The issue at hand is the conceptualization of growth, and if that is relevant for a human philosophy, then the example of a fertilized egg (human or other species) growing is relevant. It works as a counterexample to your idea that growth requires "a ground."

"A structure is something that does not change over a period of time .. And then of course it may change rapidly in a short time, and establish a new lasting structure for some time .. So the "fluid structure" really isnt a structure since it changes slowly all the time. It is a pseudo-structure at best. For that reason I find the concept weak and passive....The "fluid structure" is a vague concept, and from my view very old school philosophy (postmodern)."

I agree "fluid structure" is a vague concept. I wanted to indicate an apparent paradox which I think continues to be a real problem for philosophy, exactly as you say here, that a structure is unchanging over a period of time...However everything is unchanging over some period of time, or conversely everything is changing over some period of time. We can think the unchanging, very much along the lines of Descartes, which has been very successful. We cannot think change philosophically. We can think change mathematically, starting with Newton. If to think mathematically is to think philosophically, we would probably, in my opinion, do well to dispose of most of philosophy--it's cumbersome, and in a way it is just a reliquary of vague, weak and passive formulations. However, I do not believe that to think mathematically is to think philosophically. But some vital element of both philosophy and mathematics(science) broke off diminishing both mathematics and science when these were divided in the Enlightenment. I want to find that vital element. For the time being, I do now and then need to use vague concepts such as "fluid structure."

Unless you are a mathematician (and a highly skilled one!) I think you are unlikely to succeed in finding the "vital element" that broke of, as you say ..

I also think that the Enlightenment is over, it is not a question of going back to it and somehow continue it or pick up its promise. The Enlightenment had a beginning, and an end.

However I also happen to think there is a missing vital piece to science. And I think I found out what it is.

There was a reason we created a subject and object dualism (in the Enlightenment). The reason we did so was to efficiently project the world as objective. Such a radical move was nessesary for us to proberly explore it. What we really explored was our selves, but of course if we knew that we could not do it. Ergo, the projection became dualistic. Perhaps even to the extent that it changed our own being into one of representation.

This is the vital element missing from science, and revealed so in mathematics. The world is mathematical yet math exists nowhere in the world.

The contemporary question for philosophy to answer is:

What has financial crisis and balloon-economy to do with Volcano eruptions on Iceland?

I don't think we have a very large disagreement. I don't believe the subject object dualism was born in the Enlightenment. I agree with Nietzsche that it is as old as Socrates. So, from the very beginning of what we call philosophy,thought has conceived itself as taking off some element of experience which is a vital element. The vital element is change. Change was seen by philosophers as ephemeral, inessential, illusory, shadows dancing on a wall. Philosophy never overcame this-- The great mathematicians of the historical Enlightenment offered an opportunity to philosophy and thus also to western culture to think change, but this opportunity was blocked by the dividing practice of separating philosophy and science. We can't change ourselves or our world if we can't think change, change our thinking. I don't think it is an accident that we can't think change, that our thought is construed as being timeless--that's been to the advantage of those who do not want ourselves or our world to change in the way we would change it if we could.

So your idea is that during the Enlightenment philosophy and science was divided, and that science at the time in accord with ancient Platos old plan, took up the challenge of describing the dancing "shadows on a wall" and they called it Empirical. And philosophy also in accord with Platos plan, stuck with what it had been stuck with since the dawn: itself. And so the world became objective, and that was the objective.

Here is what Jaques Valle once famous french ufologist, said about control systems ..

"Vallee: If you think you're inside a control system, the first thing you have to look for is what is being controlled and try to change it to see what happens. My friend Bill Powers proposes the following analogy:

Suppose you're walking through the desert and you see a stone that looks as though it was painted white. A thousand yards later you see another stone of similar appearance. You stop and consider the matter. Either you can forget it or - if you're like me - you can pick up the stone and move it a few feet. If suddenly a bearded character steps out from behind a rock and demands to know why you moved his marker, then you know you've found a control system.

My point is that you can't be sure until you do something. Then you realize that what you were seeing, the thing that looked absurd and incongruous, was really a marker for a boundary that was invisible to everybody else until you discovered it because you looked for a pattern. I think that's exactly what we have to do with UFOs. We have to do something that will cause them to react. And I don't mean building landing strips in the desert and waiting out there to welcome the space brothers."